Comment by mort96
6 hours ago
That isn't really a case of UTF-8 sacrificing anything to be compatible with UTF-16. It's Unicode, not UTF-8 that made the sacrifice: Unicode is limited to 21 bits due to UTF-16. The UTF-8 design trivially extends to support 6 byte long sequences supporting up to 31-bit numbers. But why would UTF-8, a Unicode character encoding, support code points which Unicode has promised will never and can never exist?
In an ideal future (read: fantasy), utf-16 gets formally deprecated and trashed, freeing the surrogate sequences and full range for utf-8.
Or utf-16 is officially considered a second class citizen, and some code points are simply out of its reach.